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We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.
We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa. It isn’t a real world situation to be measuring with a case panel off only a few centimeters away from a video card.
Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.
KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum
The Sapphire Dual X cooler is reasonably quiet, emitting only a low level of fan noise under gaming load conditions.
You know im in two minds over this.
Firstly, for the price – wow, what a great deal.
But another rebadge with some ‘tweaks’ from AMD? come on, its such a cop out 🙁 At least they didnt send you a reference card. makes a change!
The HD7850 continues to live – to be fair its AMD’s best GPU ever. Thats my take, so plenty of life still left in it, especially for £100.
The GTX760 is faster, but its £200, it wont be faster than two of these in Crossfire, for the same money!
Im glad the 7850 is still around. I got upgraded to one under warranty when my 6870 died. Its great and it can play pretty much anything almost on full at 1080p.
Then I did something silly and I got another one. Crossfire is really disappointing to me. There are too many games that don’t support it properly.